The Twitter Adventures of Rupert Murdoch

The New Year is a time for new challenges and resolutions, whether it be losing weight, quitting smoking, and picking up new skills. Every New Year is a fresh start and it’s never too late to embark on a new challenge.

Indeed, such is the case with 80 year-old News Corp. (NWS) chief Rupert Murdoch, who decided to embrace social media and set up a Twitter account (@rupertmurdoch) hours before the ball dropped on 2012.

The billionaire mogul is notoriously private and does not have a good relationship with social media – his ill-fated purchase of MySpace cost his company $545 million – so it is interesting that he has decided to hop onto such a public medium of communication, especially in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

In the 40 hours and counting thus far that Murdoch’s been on Twitter, he’s posted 24 tweets, mostly from his Apple (AAPL) iPad, and he’s already landed in some controversy for a tweet criticizing Britons for taking too many holidays in such a poor economic environment. Murdoch quickly deleted the tweet, but of course, it was captured forever thanks to screencap technology.

So, one deletion and 23 tweets later, here’s what we’ve gleamed from the media mogul’s tweets:

Murdoch is obviously not a stickler for copy accuracy, making numerous typos and punctuating errors – For example, looking at his tweet that read, “Great time in sea with young daughters, uboating,” we’re fairly sure that he did not spend quality family time in the depths of the Pacific inside a submarine.

Murdoch’s trying to get an invite into the cool under-40 Silicon Valley tech crowd, judging from the people he follows and replies to, which include @jack (Twitter honcho Jack Dorsey); @markpinc (co-founder of Zynga (ZNGA)); @plaid_page (an account run for Google's (GOOG) Larry Page).